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How the Kindle Moved From BlackBerry to iPad

By Nick Bilton September 30, 2011 8:33 amSeptember 30, 2011 8:33 am

The New York TimesThe first-generation Kindle was inspired by early BlackBerry smartphones.

Do you remember the first generation Amazon Kindle? Although it helped change the publishing industry, it wasn’t exactly the prettiest gadget. It was clunky, a strange shape, and looked more like a 1960s-era calculator than an e-reader from 2007.

But there is a reason it looked so strange.

A hardware designer who worked on the first generation Kindle recently told me that the inspiration for the design came from early BlackBerry smartphones.

“Jeff Bezos would come into our design meetings and say he loved his BlackBerry and the ease with which he could find e-mails and respond to people,” the former Amazon designer explained. “That’s why the first Kindle was so boxy, had the funky square keyboard and that strange scroll wheel on the side; it was all inspired by Jeff’s BlackBerry.”

The designer asked not to be named because he had signed legal agreements that prevented him from publicly disclosing involvement in the Kindle development, including attaching it to his resume.

Since then however, the Kindle has come a long way.

The latest versions of the Kindles that were announced this week all come without those bulky scroll wheels and the dozens of cluttered buttons. Now though, in many respects, they are starting to look more like iKindles, imitating the design of the Apple iPad.

The New York TimesThe Kindle Fire, at left, next to the Apple iPad 2. The bezel and glass are the same.

“The design of the Kindle — and other tablets — are all marching to the beat of Apple’s drum; you can’t get much more minimal than a black rectangle,” said Justin Ouellette, a user interface designer at Tumblr. “I think it’s very telling that the latest Kindle uses the exact same Gorilla Glass as the iPad.”

Ryan Block, co-founder of the gadget site gdgt, noted in a blog post earlier this week that the hardware of the Kindle Fire is actually based on the Blackberry PlayBook tablet design. You might not know that from looking at the Kindle Fire because almost all tablets look relatively similar now.

“We are talking about a screen, where the screen is the entire experience and it can only really look and act one way, and that is to look similar to the iPad,” Mr. Block explained in a phone interview Thursday. “At the end of the day, they are all going to look similar, because a tablet is just a piece of glass.”

Mr. Block noted that companies trying to compete with the Apple iPad must attack on two fronts: price and software.

“Price is huge,” said Mr. Block, who noted that Amazon would clearly entice customers with the low price of the Kindle. But the software has to work too. “When all of these tablets look like a screen, the software becomes the most important factor,” he said.

Mr. Ouellette said companies could also take cues from Apple by also paying attention to minuscule design factors. “The weight, the thinness, the feel, the texture of the glass, are all really important to the overall experience,” he said. “These devices are meant to be used in a very intimate way.”